“Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. ... "These Native Americans ... believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too.… — James W. Loewen Copy Share
Many Americans have never owned a book. And others have never owned a non-fiction book. Providing them with a 300-page paperback would get them… — James W. Loewen Copy Share Image
Textbooks pretty much have no real drama. They have no real storyline. To the extent they have a storyline. — James W. Loewen Copy Share Image
Taking ideas seriously does not fit with the rhetorical style of textbooks, which presents events so as to make them seem foreordained along a… — James W. Loewen Copy Share Image
Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history. — James W. Loewen Copy Share Image
I often suggest in workshops that if you have 30 students in your American History course in 11th grade, or whatever grade level, that you maybe triple them up. You put, and have them choose, let's say 11 different Native American cultures. Maybe you give them a list of 15 and they choose 11 of those 15 so that they… — James W. Loewen Copy Share
Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch… — James W. Loewen Copy Share Image
As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands,… — James W. Loewen Copy Share
I think the first important thing is that usually most textbooks are not written by their authors. And so by author I mean the… — James W. Loewen Copy Share Image
Teachers need to teach the subject rather than to teach the textbook. — James W. Loewen Copy Share Image
“No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not succeed in white society. Whites would not let them. "Indians were always regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to live within white society except on its periphery," according to [Gary] Nash. Native Americans who amassed property, owned European-style homes, perhaps operated sawmills, merely became the first targets of white… — James W. Loewen Copy Share
“We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don't… — James W. Loewen Copy Share Image
Nobody would ever want to read a textbook about the Civil War and then interrupt that for two pages about water rights in the… — James W. Loewen Copy Share Image
